This past April, while attending my brother’s wedding, I found myself speaking with a family friend. She moved to the United States from Scotland, and one of her daughters was in my brother’s year at school.
We discussed the Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the March for Our Lives that followed, organized by now familiar names like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg.
She told me a story about another shooting, one I’d never heard about before: the Dunblane massacre. In March 1996, a man entered a Scottish primary school and used four legally purchased handguns to murder 16 children and one educator before killing himself.
The family friend told me how when she heard about the shooting, she left work to go check on her daughters, even though intellectually she knew they were safe. The situation was so alien and terrifying, that she needed to physically see her children playing in the schoolyard to regain peace of mind.
I don’t know if my own parents ever had similar reactions in the wake of the shootings that have rocked America throughout my entire life, and there are too many to name. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Parkland all spring to mind, but there are dozens more either forgotten or never known in the first place.
But there is one key difference between these shootings and the Dunblane massacre: after Dunblane, the United Kingdom enacted sweeping restrictions on handgun ownership. Australia followed suit, restricting rifle and shotgun ownership after the Port Arthur massacre, which saw 35 people gunned down in the Tasmanian city.
No equivalent national measures have ever been implemented in the United States. The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban was watered down and doomed to
